During September and October of 1945, the German Imperial Navy made repeated and brutal attempts to overtake the British base in Laurentic. Over the course of four battles, the British forces were devastated by the German fleet, resulting in a surrender agreement on October 2. This agreement called for the surrender of not only Laurentic, but Mohawk Island and all remaining sea units controlled by Great Britain and her ally, Canada. Left with no other option, the terms were agreed to by the commander of the British navy, Admiral Ronald La Rocca. A note at the corner of the document coldly states, “Failure to comply with these terms means total destruction of everything British.”

If this seems completely bizarre, it is because these battles never really happened. They took place only in the minds of fifteen-year-old Carl Nancken and his friends. Between the years 1942 and 1945, while World War II raged on in Europe, across the Atlantic a group of teenage boys were playing out fictional naval battles in a suburban home on Long Island.

The documentation of these battles is found in a black binder titled “Normandie.” Also archived within this binder are pages of detailed backstory, fleet lists, tactical maps and treaties dictating the rules of engagement. They are written out in pencil and ballpoint pen in a schoolboy’s immature cursive script and riddled with spelling errors, but the whole project shows remarkable imagination. Many of the pages are topped with a hand-drawn letterhead and there is a particularly comprehensive diagram of a disguised warship called “USS Wolf” which, as its name suggests, was meant to serve as a wolf in sheep’s clothing and pose as a merchant ship. At one point in the games chronology, Germany and Holland make an agreement that Germany, in exchange for the oil to power their fleets and their country, will provide 8 cents per month to the “Netherlands” along with naval protection. These transactions are performed with the use of “checks” written out on strips of notebook paper.

In addition to props like the German “checks,” the binder contains drawn maps of the play area. The earliest map, kept in a section titled “Naval Museam” (sic) clearly shows the upper floor of a home. The rooms are given names such as “Hall Sea” and “Tile Sea” for the bathroom. Bases are marked with common household objects and called “Shoe Island” and “Book Island.” Continue reading The War at Home: Carl Nancken’s “Normandie” Binder→

It is an unusual occurrence when a movie can spark interest in an actual historical event. Often, people are content with the Hollywood version of a time or event in history and do not seek any further information about the factors that made the event Hollywood-worthy. Monuments Men, directed by George Clooney, is a movie that triggers further curiosity into how such a story made it onto the silver screen. Monuments Men depicts a group of middle-aged art connoisseurs sent on a special mission during World War II to collect art from around Europe that was stolen by the Nazis. Though it is clearly stated that the movie was based on true events, it is surprising to learn just how true the movie is.

As it turns out, there truly was a branch of the military specifically dedicated to collecting the most historical and valuable art that was pilfered by the Nazis via orders from Hitler. The U.S Arts and Monuments Commission was established in 1943 during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency. The commission was largely founded by David Finley and Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts. About 345 men and women made up this branch of the military and over the years following the end of the war, they collected over five million pieces of artwork.

The John Bale Book Company has a collection of writing from one Monuments Man, Lincoln Kirstein, who also happens to be portrayed in the movie. In the Hollywood movie, Bob Balaban plays the character Preston Savitz who is largely based on Kirstein, an art-culture icon. As the movie suggests, all of the men that made up the branch in real life had a job or an intense personal investment in the art world and their credentials made them experts in the war effort to get the stolen art back to its proper place and Kirstein was no different. Continue reading The Man of Myth and Legend: Lincoln Kirstein, Private First Class→

Downtown Waterbury is always in flux. Consequently, so are we at the John Bale Book Company. The current changes include the leaving of People’s Bank this summer. We’ll be losing many old friends (and customers) with this change. Recently, the morning paper announced Peter Abare-Brown will be leaving his post as Director of Human Resources for the city. Pete’s been a stalwart customer and close friend (and our de facto marketing director on the side). Yesterday, another old friend and customer from out of town stopped by after interviewing for a downtown job.

Change happens.

The retail profession is not for the timid. You have to love challenges and be a bit of a gambler to boot. So why do it?

For Dan and me it was to construct a way of life that we both enjoy. We wanted independence; we wanted to see if we could succeed in building something; and we wanted a quiet life with strong community ties. We have that and more. We have a network of friends we see everyday who share the good times and bad and who are as committed to having a good, friendly city.

On Wednesday, April 22, our bookstore café hosted the Feast, an international grassroots event that links participating communities across the world. Participants sit down to a meal and pose creative solutions to community challenges. It is a chance to do good, share the results with other communities and get ideas for ways to make your environment better. Local laundromat owner Paul Tillotson suggested we try it and Waterbury was accepted into the Feast network.

That same night the city was hosting an open meeting for the public to share ideas on how to improve downtown.

Being a local business, we can’t help but want to improve the city and its economy. It’s been a core of our mission. We don’t just sell books or coffee, we participate. The bookstore has been a wonderful vehicle for helping us find like-minded people who share this outlook.

Arri Sendzimier recently announced she was moving to Montana to live close to her family. She said she’d miss the “gang” at John Bale, of which she’s a member. And we will miss her. This past Mardi Gross she helped manage the crafts tent with the Brass City Charter School volunteers. My favorite photo of her is where she is walking around wearing a giant pumpkin costume. How can you not be happy to spend your days with people like that?

Flux, a challenge. We are meeting the current changes with new ideas like our Saturday afternoon lyceum programs. We host a high tea on that day as well. On Thursdays our great friend Marty Q performs live during lunch.

When I was first introduced to “The Diabo-Lady” by William Combe, the title immediately caught my eye. Its full title reads, “The Diabo-Lady: or, A Match in Hell. A Poem. Dedicated to the Worst Woman in Her Majesty’s Dominion,” and seemed to be the product of a jilted lover lashing out at a woman who slighted him. What lies behind the dramatic title, though, is much juicier.

The poem, printed in 1777, follows a simple narrative: The worst man in His Majesty’s Dominion, has just been crowned Satan in Combe’s earlier poem, “The Diaboliad.” The new King of Hell decides that he should marry, and sends his minions across the world to find the most sinful women and bring them back to compete for a position as Queen of Hell (Combe 1-3). Conveniently, they find quite a selection of such women from the common gossip of eighteenth-century England. Each woman presents herself and tells Satan about her sins and misdeeds in order to convince him that she is the most evil woman in the world.

One of the fascinating aspects of this poem is that the women presenting themselves as potential brides for Satan were real women. None of the women are named in the poem except with single initials and dashes or asterisks, ostensibly to protect the reputation of the women who were featured in the poem. However, the identities of these high profile women would have been easily determined by its contemporary audience. Horace Bleackley, who put together a convenient identification key for “Diabo-Lady,” found that “most of the… names appear in the ‘Tete-a-Tete Histories’ of The Town and Country Magazine” (Bleakley). During the same time “The Diabo-Lady” was printed, “scandal sheets” such as “Town and Country” documented the stories of badly behaved, high profile men and women in much the same way as modern tabloids (Grose). The “Tete a Tete” stories in particular covered recent affairs between members of high society and made the stories common knowledge among the public.

Eva’s train to Switzerland included a hefty meal of “fish, roast veal, potato, string beans, cheese, pastry, and a fresh peach.” The customs check-point in Basel, Switzerland seems to have been more lax than in Paris; the officer asked if the girls had any cigars or cigarettes and let them pass when they said no—“that’s all there was to it.” The mountain ranges seemed to have impressed Eva the most as she describes “how wonderful [it was] to look out and see those great touring peaks outlined against the sky.” The scenery and the quiet soothed Eva as she began to write and reflect on how noisy it was in Paris.

The girls took an Alpine tour on their first full day in Switzerland, which circled around the mountain closest to their hotel, on the Lucerne Lake. The tour bus ascended four thousand feet around the steep, narrow cliff sides. As they approached the infamous Devil’s Bridge, Eva describes how “we could hardly brace ourselves against the wind to walk. And cold! Just about froze.” Soon they rode above the snow line to see “great fields of daises, buttercups, and many others… the sight of all the colors against the snow was spectacular.” An attractive destination spot for this particular part of Montreux, Switzerland is the Rhone Glacier, the largest in the Alps contributing to several surrounding rivers and lakes including Lake Geneva. Eva describes the glacier as “a huge jagged mass of blue ice.” The other girls got the chance to go down through the glacier but Eva chose to stay behind because she “[didn’t] like to feel trapped.”

Small Alpine towns dot the mountainsides that over-look the glacier for sight-seers to stay. The girls stayed at a hotel in one such town— Gotthard-Furka-Grimsel. Eva describes the loud “roar of the melting snow as it started to form the Rhone River.” Her night at the glacier was cold; she needed to sleep with all her clothes on and in the morning she woke up with her “neck as stiff as a board.” Eva also learned that she dislikes Swiss coffee, and their hot chocolate “was made out of goat’s milk, and it tasted like a stewed bransack” (a simmered bag of grain).

On their decent down the 5,000 foot mountain, the girls stopped in the town that circled Lake Geneva and visited the Castle of Chillon. The castle dates back to at least 1005 where it was used as a Roman guarding post and later as a sixteenth century prison. Eva did not go inside the castle because “that night club scared [her] so [she] dared not go in anywhere again.”

At this point in her trip, Eva is two weeks from being “out on the Atlantic on the way home” and she almost cannot wait to be there as she “hopes there will be peas and radishes” when she arrives home.
The last leg of their journey starts with arriving in Germany on July 20th. The train ride to Germany was “hot and dirty, not much like the Swiss trains.” The girls had a good laugh over what they were served for supper aboard the train: “soup, steak, potato, vegetable salad, a big piece of cheese (for which [they] needed a gas mask), a pretzel, and a bottle of beer.” What else could one expect of a German meal in the 1930s?

Scrapbooking is a hobby that dates back to the early fifteenth century and has gone through several transitions in popularity. Though the art of scrapbooking has been modified with the rise of social media, crafters would argue that scrapbooking is making a come-back, reflected in an increase in popularity and sales over the last few years. Nowadays, it is so easy to snap a picture and caption it on Instagram, to be saved forever in the “cloud” of the All Mighty Internet.

While virtual scrapbooking saves a lot of space, there is something to be said for the physical artifacts saved from another time and place far removed from one’s own. Upon finding a scrapbook from a Ms. Eva D. Lother, we are taken back to the summer of 1932 as she embarks on a trans-Atlantic journey with her friends while they explore six European countries in about one month.

Eva Lother comes from Lakeport, New Hampshire. Though her age is never specifically mentioned in her scrapbook, it is likely she is a young woman perhaps in her mid to late twenties. At the time of Eva’s departure in 1932, the Great Depression was devastating the country; Eva’s ability to go on such a trip may means she came from a wealthy family. In fact, she makes no mention of the Depression in any of her letters.

Eva begins her journey by arriving to New York on July 1, 1932 to board the tourist steamer S. S Westward for a ten day excursion across the Atlantic, obtaining a ticket for about $250.00 (according to Dave Manuel’s inflation calculator, this would be about $4,300 in 2015). In her first letter to her mother, Eva describes the mob of people boarding the ship and family members waving goodbye in the steaming heat of a July afternoon, “The lady on the statue of Liberty waved bye to us and we were off!”

Bookstores used to be a place where you went to discover something new or something that would entertain you– much like a library except you got to pay for the book and keep it forever. That’s what it was like when we opened our doors 22 years ago. In the ensuing years the Internet changed all that. Now, much of what you read is online, and in the case of Google Books, it is for free. This has forced bookstores and libraries to rethink their purpose in the community.

Our company has more than 80,000 books listed for sale online, books that sit in boxes on shelves in a warehouse. When one sells, we retrieve it and ship it out to every part of the world (even Antarctica). But people still, on occasion, come into the store to buy books the old-fashioned way and that is why our first floor maintains a selection of general knowledge titles. For collectors and scholars, the second floor contains older, more specialized titles and bindings. And there is a third component, those things that sell at trade shows to serious collectors.

So, if most people buy books online, what is the role of the bookstore? Economic development people like bookstores because it hearkens to a more genteel time. Bookstores announce, “This is a literate town, one that appreciates learning”‘ But bookstores aren’t just “window dressing.” We have a role in the new computer-connected world.